I had a hard time getting the MySQL 5.1.8 ODBC driver to work with Excel 2011 on my work MacBook. I'm running OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard), but this issue seems to go back some ways.

Apparently, the problem has to do with Microsoft Query being a native PPC 32 bit app, while Excel 2011 is an Intel native 32 bit app.

The solution was to use lipo to combine the distinct Mac Intel 32-bit ODBC driver with the PPC 32 bit driver.

To do this, download and extract the myodbc connector drivers from the MySQL site in tar.gz format. You need both the intel-x86-32bit and the ppc-32bit downloads. Extract them both next to each other in a tmp dir (/Users/drew/tmp, or whatever). Then, from your tmp dir, use lipo to make a multi-arch version. (To widen out the text area so you can see the full command, use my "hide panel" button to hide the right column of this page. Also, remember that backslash means "continue command on next line."):

At work, we installed a Linksys RV016 Router + VPN solution. After one of our sys admins setup and turned on the firewall rules, I lost the ability to browse certain sites including slashdot.org, news.yahoo.com, and many others. But, many sites were fine.

I spent some time trying to figure out what the problem was, and realized that with the firewall disabled, everything was ok, but when it was on, I had troubles. Some web pages or images would load part way.

Other things I noticed included:

WinXP and MacOSX boxes didn't have this problem. Only the two Fedora boxes did.

It wasn't Linux specific - CentOS 4.x and Ubuntu Live didn't have the same problem.

Hand built kernels at or below 2.6.12 didn't show this problem, somewhere above 2.6.17, they did.

So, I had tracked it down to a kernel related change somewhere between 2.6.13 through 2.6.17.

I was able to route around the issue by using another point of entry, but that was a temporary fix. Eventually, I sought help on the Fedora mailing list and was pointed to a discussion on lkml (linux kernel mailing list). This led to a fix.

The discussion starts around here on lkml.
The most important bit is here.

The workaround was to turn off tcp_window_scaling. To test this, do this: